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Rachel Glennerster

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Rachel Glennerster is the Lead Academic for IGC Sierra Leone.

Rachel is also Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and sits on the UK government’s Department for International Development’s Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact. Before joining the IGC, Rachel Glennerster worked on debt relief and the reform of the international monetary system at the International Monetary Fund, and financial regulation at the Harvard Institute for International Development and the UK Treasury. In the mid-1990s she was part of the UK delegation to the IMF and World Bank. She has a PhD in economics from Birkbeck College, University of London, and is coauthor of “Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases.”

Content by Rachel Glennerster

Publication - Project Report

Project

Political debates are considered a key part of campaign outreach in many contemporary democracies. Debates can reveal information about the relative quality of candidates and their policy positions. By creating a public record of pre-election commitments, they may enhance the subsequent accountability of elected officials.
In Sierra Leone, civic education and citizen...

Publication - Bulletin

Project

Sierra Leone’s health sector has significantly underperformed since the end of the civil war
The Government solicited advice from IGC to help design a social health insurance scheme for the informal sector
Researchers worked with the Directorate of Policy, Planning and Information (DPPI) providing input on the design of the insurance plan
The Sierra...

Project

Katherine Casey (Stanford), Rachel Glennerster (J-PAL), and Tavneet Suri (MIT) have initiated a research project studying the firm-level impact of the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone. Our objective is twofold: first, to bring reliable quantitative data to the policy discussion as the outbreak unfolds in real time; and second, to establish baseline information on the private...

Project

Local councils were reintroduced into Sierra Leone in 2004 and were given the responsibility for local development and supervision of local public services. There is considerable debate in Sierra Leone and other countries about the extent to which development funds should be decentralized to councils as well as what role, if any, Members of Parliament should take in...

Project

Rachel Glennerster and Tavneet Suri have analysed the impact of the Ebola crisis on the functioning of agricultural markets in Sierra Leone. Several rounds of phone call-based market surveys have aimed to understand how commodity prices are shifting across different regions and how trading has been affected. The researchers partnered with Innovations for Poverty Action to...

Project

In spite of the central relevance of infrastructure in the development policy debate, there has been little rigorous research on the impact of large scale infrastructure investments in very poor economies. It is usually difficult to disentangle the causal impact of infrastructure on economic outcomes as infrastructure is often built in the fastest growing areas of a...

Project

Over the past decades, agricultural productivity has stagnated in much of sub-Saharan Africa while many other regions have seen dramatic productivity improvements. As a result, many African countries do not produce enough staple food to meet their growing consumption needs. Sierra Leone, a net exporter of rice in the 1960s, must now import a third of its total consumption...

Multimedia Item - Video

Blog post

Across much of the world, votes are often caste on the basis of regional ties, patronage politics, or simple bribery. In Freetown last week, politicians, civil society, academics, and media came together to discuss ways to make politicians more accountable and to encourage people to base their vote on policies and performance, rather than party loyalty and/or gifts. In the...

Project

Evidence from India and Brazil suggests that increased information about politician performance can result in lower vote shares for low-performing or corrupt representatives. Using the 2012 elections in Sierra Leone, this project looks at the impact of public screenings of debates between electoral candidates on voting outcome.
In the run-up to the November 2012...

1 Jul 2010 | Kelly Bidwell, Rachel Glennerster, Katherine E. Casey

Project

A significant analysis of the popular community driven development (CDD) programmes in post-war Sierra Leone has found that although CDD has positive impacts on enhancing the quality of local public goods and improved household economic welfare, it does not increase participation in local governance as previously believed.
Despite the World Bank’s push for greater...